What’s All This Branding Stuff About, Anyway?

Anti-Monkey Butt Powder

No, I’m not making this up.  This pic has not been PhotoShopped within an inch of it’s life. It’s the real deal, I promise.

That’s right, folks.  There’s actually a health/beauty aid product called [drumroll, please] “Anti-Monkey Butt Powder.” And they just extended the product line to include a Ladies variety, replete with – you guessed it – a female monkey sporting a pink hair ribbon.

How do you start to bring this – or any CPG product, let’s say – to market?  Let’s assume all the requisite data and survey respondents have first validated the market need for, ahem, the product.

We Have A Small Problem

Well, I put the powder on the same shelf (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun) as Preparation H, Summer’s Eve, Compound W, and a host of other products on the market that people have to buy but don’t want to talk about. They hide them under that bag of candy, loaf of bread, or package of paper towels in their grocery cart.

So if you have a product that people (albeit, perhaps a small segment of the population) need but are too embarrassed to buy, how do you bridge that gap?  Well, the Anti-Monkey Butt Corporation (OMG!) decided to call a spade a spade and embraced the mindset of many who might use their product (bikers, over-the-road drivers, commercial drivers of all sorts) and went the no-nonsense, candid, and undoubtedly humorous route.  They latched on to the earthy colloquialism and said “If the shoe fits, wear it.”  They called the product what it is.  Or rather, what it does.

No Pressure Or Anything

So undoubtedly there was some education, on some level, that had to take place first.  I mean, it stands to reason that if a great many people who have an affliction can’t or won’t talk about it because it’s personal, then it’s a safe guess they might be in denial that they need it.

But what AMB does is kinda beautiful.  They don’t hide behind a bunch of fuzzy benefit statements that still leave you wondering exactly what it does, and where it should be used.  Smartly, they even have a race car sponsorship that makes you nod slightly and say to yourself “oh, I get it.”  Because of course, those drivers sit for a long time in the heat while concentrating on work, right?  Kinda takes the benefit statement a step further in this case and validates it.  The flip side is, that could be a risk–a great number of endorsements (think Danika Patrick and Boost Mobile) really don’t tie product and celebrity/situation together well.

Did We Pull It Off?

Well, it might be hard to say at this point.  I can’t imagine what the anticipated sales are year over year, if there’s share to snare from a competitor.  Maybe there’s some huge forecast of increase in OTR trucking jobs in the next 5 years, creating larger market opportunity.  More line extensions? One can only hope not.

In the end, I’ll tip my hat to AMB.  It’s risky out there in health/beauty aid world, and it could be hard to convince me you’ve got a solution if I’m not really aware there’s a problem.  But your name and your look are worth a second glance, and maybe that’s when I start to wonder if it wouldn’t hurt to try. For someone else.

Plus, it makes a great 40th birthday gag gift, eh?